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[school-discuss] Master schedule creation software survey (long)



On Wed, Sep 04, 2002 at 01:48:58PM -0400, Doug Loss wrote:
> Take a look in the Administrative category of the SEUL/edu Educational
> Applications Index.  The ones that look promising to me are asigna, Calcium,
> Carnegie, eduBase, Educational Information System, JAdvisor, OpenSIS, phpCBS,
> scheduler, Schedulist, Tablix, and XPUSP.  I've probably missed a few.

So I took a look - Here's what I found.

Report on possible Master schedule creation apps from SEUL:

		SCORING KEY:  All Score are in the range of zero to ten
		All score are subjective.  the judges decision is final.
		( but may be appealed :) )

	MSS = "Master Schedule creation Score" How well does this software
		do at creating a Master schedule for an organization ?
		A Zero here means that the software either does not have
		this ability or the ability has not yet been implemented.
		A zero may also mean that not much info was found about
		this project.

	VS  = "Viability Score"   How Alive is this project ?  Ten means it
		is released and is in production and is actively used
		with a satisfactory result reported by the users..
		A zero may mean the project has been abandoned or is
		other wise not being developed or it may mean that not
		enough info could be found about the project.

	R  = "Rating"  
		A guess of how useful this project will be for creating
		Master schedules.  This is totally subjective.	Just a
		gut feel. 


asigna; From the description on SEUL this appears to do the job.
It appears that this is a subproject of the Columbian Structio project.	
Unfortunately the docs are all in Spanish so English only speakers can't
use it. foo.  Alas I was unable to find its project page on Sourceforge so I
have no sense of how much development work is actually being done on it.
The Columbians are coming on strong in Education software.  Maybe I should
switch to Spanish ? 
MSS:0
VS:?
R:0  Sadly and probably lower than it deserves.


Calcium, this comment from the SEUL database says it all:
Commercial software. Expensive! $95 for a personal license and all
it does is some limited calendaring functions, make an appt, reserve a
meeting room etc.. Based on its description I don't believe it belongs in
the SEUL database. It doesn't seem to be educational software, just regular
office calendaring software and too expensive and limited at that.
MSS:0
VS:0
R:0



Carnegie:  Doesn't generate course schedules, just allows students to
generate their own individual schedules from info downloaded from various
colleges websites.  Quite clever, Maybe these guys will do something
for Master schedules someday.
MSS:0
VS:10  Looks like a good thing for students
R:0

eduBase: does a lot of stuff, but not Master Schedule creation
MSS:0
VS:? no files released yet
R:0



EIS (Educational Information System):  Development based in France.
Last active development was in May 2002.  A demo is available.  The current
feature description doesn't allow one to determine if it does Master
schedule creation.
MSS:0
VS:3
R:0



LLEU  Last development in August 2002.  Looks active. Doesn't look like it
does Master schedule creation.
MSS:0
VS:8
R:0



JAdvisor Looks like it does something similar to Carnegie above. Written in
Java with expandability to add adapters for additional schools.
MSS:0
VS:7
R:0



OpenSIS:  Website gone, no DNS record.  Source forge indicate no CVS
activity since September 2001.  Seems to be a dead project.  I will ask
SEUL to remove it from the SEUL index unless i hear from Ben Efros who
is the guy who started it.
MSS:0
VS:0
R:0  DITW (Dead in the water)



phpCBS  Website not accessible (Hyperlink given as a static IP address ????)
MSS:0
VS:0
R:0



SAGU  The homepage is well done and detailed, looks very active But since
its written in another language I can't tell what it does !
MSS:
VS:
R:


scheduler  No website found.  too bad, the description sounded promising.
MSS:0
VS:0
R:0


Schedulist:  This is a schedule pretty printer. AFTER you have created the
Master schedule in "Detailed XML" this program will format the output in
HTML.  may be useful if we can find a program to create the schedule.
MSS:0
VS:10
R:0


Tablix  AHA!  written in C, Tablix is a high school timetable
generator. It uses a coarse-grained parallel genetic algorithm to construct
sensible timetables from XML-formated school information files. It can run
on a single host as well as on a heterogeneous parallel virtual machine by
using MIT's PVM3. Its features include a number of possible restrictions
for teachers or classes, HTML-formatted output, and configurable genetic
parameters.
MSS:6
VS:9
R:5


XPUSP University Schedule Planner is an application with a web interfaced
program that, given a set of teachers, a set of Students and a set of
classes each one with several restrictions, builds a schedule for the
university classes. This project looks like it may be a real winner.
It is being produced in Latin America, Brazil at the University of Sao
Paulo.
MSS:8
VS:9
R:5




-- 
Jeff Kinz, Director, Emergent Research,  Hudson, MA.  "jkinz@ultranet.com" 
copyright 1995-2002.  Use restricted to non-UCE uses. Any other use is an 
acceptance of the offer at http://www.ultranet.com/~jkinz/policy.html.
"jkinz@rcn.com" copyright 2002.  Use is restricted. Any use is an 
acceptance of the offer at http://users.rcn.com/jkinz/policy.html.

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